Notices by Wilfred Hughes (wilfredh@mastodon.social)

Wonderful, empathetic discussion of open source dynamics, emotional associations and mindset: https://blog.burntsushi.net/foss/

Today I learnt that GNU readline supports editor macros! If you often find yourself typing something, you can create a shortcut.

https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html

Replacing openSSL with Rustls can improve execution time, memory usage, and security! https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-rust-based-tls-library-outperformed-openssl-in-almost-every-category/

The potential performance improvements will probably motivate adoption even in C/C++ programs.

The base ISA for RISC-V has been ratified, so there's a stability promise! https://riscv.org/2019/07/risc-v-foundation-announces-ratification-of-the-risc-v-base-isa-and-privileged-architecture-specifications/

Friday's xkcd is blunt but fair: it's very hard to secure any part of a modern computer stack, and we depend on all of it: https://m.xkcd.com/2166/

Stripe has released a static gradual type system for Ruby! https://sorbet.org/blog/2019/06/20/open-sourcing-sorbet

Perhaps the moral here is to worry about a building a great runtime, and only worry about the type system if your language gains traction?

A cute Pharo IDE feature that I miss on other editors: you can view all the subclasses that implement a method, and edit them from inside that search UI! It's a lovely way to refactor.

Zero cost abstractions, and what persuades other developers to use our abstractions: https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/zero-cost-abstractions/

IPv4 addresses are now so valuable that people are committing fraud to obtain them! http://www.circleid.com/posts/20190514_735k_fraudulently_obtained_ip_addresses_have_been_revoked/

MIPS is going to be open source, competing with RISC-V!

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334087
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334317

.mdx files are a mix of markdown and JSX, used for writing content heavy websites like blogs: https://reacttraining.com/blog/gatsby-mdx-blog/

Interesting file format that I haven't seen before.

Rust's dbg! macro (new in 1.32) is delightful. You write dbg!(my_var) and you get a print statement that writes:

[src/my_file.rs:123] my_var = "value of my_var"

It's a huge ergonomic help when debugging!

A remarkable new scam: buy a smartphone app, record user interactions, and replay them with bots to fraudulently increase ad clicks and therefore revenue!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-a-massive-ad-fraud-scheme-exploited-android-phones-to

Seems very hard to detect, as it's using real user data to make bots appear human.

It was amazingly easy to add Tramp support to deadgrep.el. A single function change and suddenly you can run searches on remote machines too!

https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep/commit/11b380990d7e3a518ce7a642a4b3b1aa5981830c#diff-ebaf319cedbc95e2f292132ed2a27a9c

I Don't Like Notebooks: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n2RlMdmv1p25Xy5thJUhkKGvjtV-dkAIsUXP-AL4ffI/preview?slide=id.g362da58057_0_1

A good discussion of the limitations of Jupyter. It's a challenging design space: you want a helpful code sandbox without reinventing the IDE.

Fabulous introduction to the tooling, mindset, and ecosystem of Common Lisp: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

It's also frank about the quirks of the language, which is nice. There's a note on kludges that made me smile.

'Elm Lens' is a really neat idea: it exposes the number of callers to the current function in your editor! https://medium.com/@matthew.buscemi/introducing-elm-lens-2d21e05d95

Tramp using the new multithreading in Emacs! https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-07/msg00862.html

h/t @Koral_001@twitter.com

Looks like it was difficult for GitHub to maintain independence: it wasn't profitable for much of 2016: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github